How to waste students’ time
I was both amused and alarmed by your report, “Ministry urges universities to improve English skills” (Sept. 18, page 4). As teachers — and I don’t mean those who come here for a year’s working holiday — we are constantly bombarded by requests and ideas that are, to say the least, frustrating and counter-productive.
The current format of the General English Proficiency Test (GEPT) is scored out of 440. Of this, 240 questions are multiple choice, for which effective test-taking skills are sufficient to eliminate at least one or two of the options. A large percentage of the test therefore boils down to test-taking ability and knowing what to expect.
A student who passes the GEPT intermediate-level test should be able to score 550 on Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) or more than 4 on the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), but in my experience the majority of students cannot come close to that. A candidate who passes the upper-intermediate level of GEPT should be able to score around 750 on TOEIC or 5.5 on IELTS, yet I have not met one student who has done so.
The conversation component of the GEPT is recorded and measures the ability to respond to random questions or describe random situations. It doesn’t measure conversational repair or the ability to paraphrase when the listener misunderstands or asks for clarifications. This means that the conversation part of the test is inefficient and does not represent real-life conversation.
Beginner-level GEPT students are required to write an essay (or story) in the past tense with picture prompts. The majority of cram schools hammer past tense into their students, yet they are never able to respond to simple e-mail requests or write in anything other than the past tense. They spend half their writing class for the intermediate level on using relative clauses, something that adds little value or quality to writing in the real world.
I see no point in this mad promotion of a test that is accepted in very few countries other than Taiwan and is not an accurate gauge of a student’s English ability.
The Ministry of Education would be much better off promoting Cambridge main suite tests, IELTS or the Educational Testing Service tests for an accurate measurement of English ability. This would, however, require us to move away form archaic teaching methodologies and inefficient teachers.
High schools claim that their students graduate with a vocabulary of 7,000 words and a level equivalent of GEPT intermediate, or B1 according to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) for languages. That is plain rubbish.
We have highly educated and smart people who are misleading the public. One of the main problems here is presidential adviser and National Tsing Hua University professor Richard Chia-tung Lee (李家同). The amount of misinformation that is spread by people with PhDs in fields other than English is alarming and needs to be stopped or controlled.
The problem is that the general public, through no fault of their own, fall victim to this misinformation and make decisions based on faulty and unscientific premises because someone with a PhD has an opinion on teaching English. I am very sympathetic to Mr Lee’s cause and I think he does great charitable work, but the combination of his comments and reports from the Ministry of Education does nothing for developing the English ability of students in Taiwan.
Dr Sy-ying Lee (李思穎) has written excellent articles about the power of reading and how it influences writing ability, yet it seems her opinions are either not being made public or are being discounted by the general public and/or the Ministry of Education. Other leading scholars in linguistics have written equally excellent articles.
We must appreciate the science of language acquisition and adjust programs accordingly, then look at the CEFR in detail and base test-taking decisions on what is accepted internationally and what works in practice.
If we do not do this, then we are just wasting our students’ time. Our students will spend hours studying under inefficient, subpar methodologies and achieve subpar results in unrecognized tests.
For what?
GERHARD ERASMUS
Yonghe, Taipei County
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